Can the U.S. Meet Its Climate Goals Without Wind?

Among the many, many, many actions President Donald Trump took in his first week to curtail clean energy and climate policy in the U.S., he issued an order freezing all wind farm approvals. It’s anyone’s guess what happens next. On the one hand, we know the president hates wind energy — as he reiterated during his first post-inauguration interview on Fox News last week: “We don’t want windmills in this country.” But the posture is also at odds with Trump’s declaration of a national energy emergency and vision for “energy dominance.” Plus, it’s Trump. There’s a non-zero chance he’ll change his mind.

But let’s assume the wind leasing and permitting freeze stays in place for the next four years. Trump also plans to “conduct a comprehensive review of the ecological, economic, and environmental necessity of terminating or amending” existing leases, which could upheave projects already under construction or built. How do we make sense of what this all means for climate change?

Will the United States be able to meet its emissions goals?

First let’s look at what’s in the pipeline: If the pause on new leases and permits for offshore wind remains in place for the next four years, but all pre-approved projects get built, the U.S. could have about 13 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2030.

Three operating offshore wind projects currently send 174 megawatts of power to the U.S. grid. There are four projects under construction up and down the Atlantic, which are expected to generate about 5,021 megawatts once completed. Seven additional projects have all of their federal permits, and if built, could generate 7,730 megawatts. That’s a bigger “if” for some than others — three of the projects have not yet found anyone to buy their power.

13 gigawatts falls far short of a goal that the Biden administration set at the beginning of his presidency to deploy 30 gigawatts by 2030. But it was already becoming clear that the U.S. was going to miss that target. Last summer, the American Clean Power Association, which represents the offshore wind industry, projected that we were on track for about 14 gigawatts by that year, with 30 gigawatts achievable by 2033 and 40 gigawatts by 2035.

Cutting emissions sooner is, of course, better than later, but this doesn’t necessarily veer us off course for the longer-term goal of reaching net-zero emissions by 2050, either. One of the most comprehensive looks at how to decarbonize the grid is Princeton University’s Net Zero America report from 2021 (co-led by Jesse Jenkins, a co-host of Heatmap’s Shift Key podcast). The study models the economic development of carbon-free energy systems under a number of different scenarios in which energy demand grows more or less, and where renewable development is more or less constrained. Across all of them, offshore wind makes up less than 1% of the power system by 2030, with between 5 and 10 gigawatts deployed — numbers that may still be achievable. It then grows to between 1% and 7% of the system in 2050, with anywhere from 30 to 460 gigawatts deployed.

The story gets more complicated

While the national picture looks okay, it’s a much bigger deal regionally. For population centers on the East Coast, which don’t have enough available land to build the onshore wind or solar resources necessary to decarbonize, offshore wind is a linchpin. When modelers try to decarbonize states like New York or New Jersey without offshore wind, they end up with lots of transmission capacity to deliver clean power from wind and solar farms all the way in the Midwest — a prospect that’s no less, and potentially much more politically fraught than offshore wind development. Unless other clean energy sources like nuclear or geothermal power become cheap and abundant, there’s no clear alternative path for a place like New York City to get to zero emissions.

State goals also become nearly impossible if no additional projects are able to get through the permitting process until at least 2029. New York State, for example, plans to deploy 9 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2035 so that it can achieve a carbon-free grid by 2040. It currently has just 1.8 gigawatts in the pipeline, with the potential for another 1.2 if Empire Wind 2 bids into the state’s next solicitation. Maryland’s goal is 8.5 gigawatts by 2031. It has just 1 gigawatt on the way. Massachusetts aims to procure 5.6 gigawatts by 2027. It has contracts for 3.4 gigawatts, but less than half are fully permitted.

Yet another way to think about the emissions consequences of this permitting pause is in terms of opportunity cost — the projects that will be delayed, assuming it lasts four years, and the lease areas that will go unsold.

The Biden administration held several offshore wind lease sales, and currently executed leases have the potential to generate more than 36 gigawatts, according to project development documents filed with the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management and federal estimates. But the projects planned for these lease areas are in various stages of development, and some of them, like plans for floating offshore turbines in California and Maine, have many technological hurdles to solve. A four-year pause will affect those far less than the 16 gigawatts’ worth of projects that have already started the federal permitting process.

The unsold areas represent a much bigger loss. The clean energy think tank Energy Innovation found that the U.S. has potential to build more than 1,000 gigawatts of “highly productive” offshore wind projects, meaning the wind is strong and constant enough to keep the turbines spinning more than half the time. We’ve leased less than 1% of that.

But by another measure, the opportunity cost for offshore wind might not be significant considering the trajectory we’ve been on. Every year the Rhodium Group, a clean energy research firm, models expected future technology deployment and its emissions implications based on existing policies and market conditions. The group’s 2024 report found that wind energy as a whole would reach 20% to 25% of U.S. electricity generation by 2035. Those estimates include just 9 gigawatts to 12 gigawatts of offshore wind, with the vast majority from onshore installations.

What about onshore wind farms?

That brings us to the implications of pausing onshore wind development, which are arguably worse.

To date, the U.S. has installed about 152 gigawatts’ worth of land-based wind farms. Under the Net Zero America scenarios, that number should more than double by 2030. But deployment has slowed in recent years. The U.S. added just 6.4 gigawatts to the grid in 2023, down from 14.2 in 2020. While the 2024 totals haven’t been published, we were on track to add 7.1 gigawatts last year. We’d have to add more than three times that every year, starting this year, to meet the Net Zero America study’s 2030 projections.

Onshore wind deployment has been held back, in part, by transmission constraints. If the new administration clears hurdles to building more power lines, it could help speed things up. Also, since many onshore wind projects are built on private land, Trump’s order won’t have the same sweeping effect that it will offshore. But as my colleague Jael Holzman reported, the impact could still be far-reaching. More than half of all wind projects under development may be affected by the pause, as many are so tall that they need approvals from the Federal Aviation Administration. Energy-hungry projects like data centers may end up turning to natural gas, instead.

Trump’s executive order labels the pause of leasing and permitting as “temporary,” so all of this is still hypothetical. Perhaps a bigger existential threat to the industry would be if Congress decided to cut the tax credits for wind energy or wind them down earlier than currently planned to pay for the continuation of Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, many of which expire this year. But since the tax credits are now pooled together with other energy sources that Republicans support, like nuclear and geothermal, under "technology neutral” credits, that would be a lot harder to do.